


swapped roles

by silverxrain



Category: Naruto
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Team Asuma - Freeform, Team Gai - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-08
Updated: 2016-04-08
Packaged: 2018-06-01 00:45:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,495
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6494167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/silverxrain/pseuds/silverxrain
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The roles of a kunoichi and a ninja aren't always that clear cut.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Sakura

On a mission with Sakura, Shikamaru watches her lay a genjutsu on a young chūnin they captured which tortured him for hours until he gave up the vital information to end their mission successfully without any more damage to them. He and Sakura were fifteen. The chūnin couldn't have been more than three or four years older than her, but Shikamaru looked away while Sakura paid close attention until it was finally over and Sakura stood and went over to him and slit his throat neatly with a kunai. Then she relayed the necessary information to Shikamaru to allow him to formulate a strategy. It was her only kill on the mission. Shikamaru killed one ninja and badly injured two others, and yet he is the one who is unable to sleep on the way back to the village. Sakura, who is taking first watch, looks over at him.

"Can't sleep?" she asks, with one of her gentle smiles, her luminous green eyes concerned.

"I'll be fine," Shikamaru says, and rolls over in his bedroll. He rubs his temples where a headache is beginning to form. One of the enemy hit him on the head with some kind of earth jutsu. At least, that's his excuse. The screams from their prisoner are embedded into his skull, and Shikamaru can't close his eyes without seeing that neat line of red that followed Sakura's kunai.

"I could put you to sleep until it's your turn for watch," Sakura adds. Her hands are raised to perform the simple genjutsu, and Shikamaru flinches away. "I'll be fine, Sakura," he says quickly, to try and cover it up. Shinobi notice everything. She saw the movement, but she ignores it and casts her eyes back to the dark forest.

"Okay," she says brightly, and climbs the side of the nearest tree trunk before he can order her to. He is technically her commander on this mission, but Sakura has been moving so efficiently he hasn't needed to give her a single order.

Shikamaru shuts his eyes and determinedly thinks about home and how short a time it'll be before he sees Chouji and Ino again.

Whenever it's his turn for watch, he pays attention to Sakura's resting form. He sees that she doesn't sleep the entire night.


	2. Kakashi

Everyone knows that the Silk Lord likes little boys. This is the most useful piece of information Kakashi's squad can uncover to help them assassinate the head of the merchant guild of Wave, who is maintaining an iron fist over the goods leaving and arriving into the seaport, and driving hundreds to destitution. A rival of his for the position of head of the guild has hired the Leaf, and

Kakashi's squad contains three shinobi. The other two that aren't him are kunoichi but it seems their particular skills won't be needed on this mission. One of them is their captain anyway, and it would be demeaning. Kakashi is not yet captain, that will come in the near future, but every ANBU member needs to prove themselves on their first few missions, especially the ones with teammates. Kakashi is the youngest member of the squad. It makes his captain sick to do it, but she sends him because ANBU are there to do the unthinkable, and Hatake knew what he was signing up for. They all did.

The Silk Lord's valet knocks on his door with a scowl on his face. There's a boy to see you, Takao-sama, he says.

Takao-sama likes Kakashi's unusual hair, and his slender neck and limbs, and he likes his mouth best of all. Takao has a guard at all times, even during filthy encounters like these. He has no shame, not in his business dealings or in personal ones. The guard standing watch today is a missing-nin from Stone, and her face is blank. Kakashi has to wait a long time, and engage in increasingly more lewd acts until finally she averts her eyes, and Kakashi curses her for the fact that she had to wait until Takao was hilt deep in Kakashi to give him his opportunity, just for that he will make the kill painful.

 

Kakashi wipes blood off his blade. Takao' corpse is messy. The rival who hired them wants everyone to know what happens to guild heads who play dirty. He snags the Stone kunoichi's scratched forehead protector off her arm before he goes, because all the same civilians hate ninjas, and it wouldn't do to have any trace of shinobi at the scene.

"You fought well," Kakashi tells the kunoichi. Her blank eyes stared straight through him. She had shown no emotion throughout the fight, not even surprise when Kakashi had pulled a kunai from beneath the pillow and stabbed Takao through the throat before dragging the heavy merchant's body off himself and tossing him onto the floor.

Tamiko-san had cast a silencing jutsu already around the room, from outside the building, so Kakashi had no need to worry as he brawled with the missing-nin. She had put up a ferocious fight and Kakashi had several wounds that needed immediate seeing to, but in the end he managed to paralyzed her with senbon and simply hacked her head off with a tanto.

Tamiko-san and his captain are waiting in the forest. "You did well, Hatake," the ANBU captain tells him, placing a hand on his shoulder. He hears regret in her voice. Kakashi is so young. Tamiko-san squeezes his hand. Kakashi just looks at them. He puts his ANBU mask on once Tamiko releases his hand, and says, "Let's go."

Kakashi dreams about sweaty hands gripping his thighs and pushing them apart.


	3. Ino

The prisoner watches as the guards return with a slender, curvy teenager. Sending a young girl in to torture him. The Leaf are disgusting. And then she steps out of the shadows. That characteristic match of blonde hair and pupilless blue eyes. he's been in their hands before. "Yamanaka," he whispers. Then he begins to tremble. The girl's marble features arrange themselves into a smirk.

Ino is crying again.

Sakura came around to bring her some scrolls on a type of medical jutsu they were learning together, but instead is is on her bedroom floor holding her old best friend in her arms.

This isn't unusual.

Sakura hadn't known she had been in to Torture and Interrogation today. Sakura usually tries to avoid coming to see Ino after she's been working in T&I. But apparently, a large group of ninja were taken prisoner, and they hold vital information which cannot be gotten out of them easily. They have already been tortured. Ino has all their memories now. All of them. Including the agonizing pain, the ripping and tearing and spilling, and the knowledge which will help the mission to defeat their master. It's worth it, no matter the ravage of Ino's psyche. It's all worth it, even the days Ino doesn't leave her bedroom, or even her bed, and Sakura is too afraid to come see her until Ino's mother calls her and asks. Then Sakura comes and sits with Ino until the tears subside.

But sometimes, Ino doesn't shed a single tear, and those are the worst times. Sometimes, Ino just sits and stares at the wall, her pupilless eyes vacuous, and then Sakura will have to find Shikamaru or Chouji because only her teammates can snap her out of that trance. Inoichi is so busy that she is afraid to disturb him, even though she's sure he would also be able to help her during those times, and these days Shikamaru is too, and Chouji is the only one with time left for Ino. Sakura hates getting Chouji, because after he's gently shaken his teammate's shoulders and whispered her name a few times, and Ino blinks rapidly and focuses on his face, he goes outside her house and cries, and after she's gotten Ino's mother to make Ino some tea and talk to her to keep her alert, Sakura goes outside and Chouji sobs on her shoulder as she pats his back. So whatever she does, someone is crying.

Sakura doesn't cry. She is the one who stitches up the prisoners after torture and before interrogation. She throws up, retching into a bowl for hours afterwards, but she has promised herself not to cry.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was intending to have each character appear in only one story but it seems that isn't going to happen.


	4. Shikamaru

The Lord of the Land of Earth is a woman, Shikamaru found out when he was assigned to gather intelligence about a possible schism between the Land of Earth and its Hidden Village. Shikamaru took it as proof that women were more trouble than they were worth.

Shikamaru would never dream of voicing this sentiment to Tsunade-sama, as he stands before her waiting to receive his orders, but seeing the scowl on he face (she hates Earth Country and the reason is probably an event which occurred during her lost years and more likely than not to be something to do with her gambling habits). His mission is infiltration and intelligence gathering. Doesn't sound so hard, but at the same time, not very flashy, he thinks to himself. But then again, flashy isn't worth the effort. This'll be easy. Sweet-talk a few women and listen in to important meetings while pretending to be a brainless courtier. Simple. Although usually a mission reserved for kunoichi. However, as the Lord of Earth Country is currently a woman, and so is her heir, it has to be done this way.

Women, Shikamaru decides, slipping into the decorative kimono worn by the nobles of the court of Earth, are far more trouble than they are worth.

In the end, he had to seduce Lady Kikuë's daughter, Nayoko-hime, who according to intelligence was as thick as thieves with her mother. Kikuë fully intended for her daughter to be her heir and waned to ensure that the girl would never let a husband rule her, so she allowed her harmless flings in order to relieve her hormones, but otherwise trained the girl to be ruthless and powerful just as she was.

But Nayoko was still young, and not quite as cold as her mother. At night in bed, Nayoko told Shikamaru the stories of her day in court, related the burden of her mother's expectations on her, so relieved to finally have someone to talk to, who would be understanding and listen and cared about her.

Shikamaru felt dirty sometimes, listening to the girl spill her secrets, like he was wearing someone else's discarded clothes. Kikuë clearly mistrusted him, and Shikamaru let her think he was just a gold-digger trying to worm into the affections of the future ruler, rather than let her suspect the truth for a minute. He was a shinobi, perfect at seeming emotionless, but he had little training in learning how to fake emotion. His reserves of patience had almost been spent by the spiteful, petty people of the court, and nothing in his life had prepared him for this type of mission. Faking a relationship which was devoid of all meaning, actively pretending to be far stupider than he was. He had been raised to know that this type of mission was just what a kunoichi should excel at.

But Tsunade-sama had entrusted him with this. She thought he was the only one who could manage it. The Hokage had to know best, right? Even if she was only a woman...

"Nobuo!" Nayoko calls. Shikamaru heaves a sigh deep inside. He stares at himself in the mirror. He barely recognizes himself, with the fancy clothes and the eyeliner and his hair loose. He wears a simple genjutsu on his eyes to make them look gray. Simple tricks like these take little chakra and make it harder to identify someone after their mission is over. He carefully arranges his features into a perfect smile, and says, "I'm coming."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shikamaru is just easy for me to write, for some reason, so that's why he's in it multiple times.


	5. Tenten

Now that Neji is a jōnin, Tenten and Lee are sent out together a duo more often. They spend less time with their Hyuuga teammate, but then, they never saw much of him anyway. Gai is still a constant presence in their lives anyways, so it doesn't feel like they've lost their team.

Now that Neji is gone and most of his missions are with Tenten, Lee is determined to train especially hard so he can protect his female teammate, because as chūnin they are on their own now, and he is the only one there to watch Tenten's back.

On their latest mission to stop a group of pillaging, murdering thieves, it turns out that the thieves who were thought to be merely civilians with some weapons training were actually shinobi who, using robbery as a cover, had been kidnapping children with the potential to be ninjas with the goal of training them to be perfect killers, and killing their parents.

After Tenten finds a seven year old girl standing over the bodies of her parents with two of the bandits gripping her arms, Tenten kills eleven of the shinobi with one weapons scroll. She sets about taking apart the rest of the group using a relentless barrage of weapons. As she is tiring, Lee, holding the girl a safe distance away, where she doesn't have to watch the massacre, spies one of their enemy crouched on a roof, pointing a crossbow with ninja modifications at Tenten, who is whirling through the air. There is a lull in her bombarding of weapons and the ninja on the roof looses an arrow at his teammate. Lee sets the girl down gently, then faster than the eye can follow, he snaps the heavy arrow in two with a powerful kick.

Tenten drops, bringing her favorite axe down into the chest of the leader of the bandits. She looks over her shoulder. "Thanks, Lee," she calls. She leaps up onto the roof behind the lone ninja and puts a kunai through his neck.

Lee lands on the roof beside her. "Always happy to help, Tenten," he says, grinning. Tenten wipes at the spray of blood on the side of her face, but only succeeds in smudging it over her eyebrow. Her body's littered with small cuts and larger bruises, where she was tossed into walls.

The little girl is on the roof with them, hiding behind Lee, his right hand in her small grasp. She steps out now, and Tenten smiles at her with her bloody face. The girl smiles back.

"They were right about you," Tenten says. "You would be a great shinobi. But it should always be your choice what you do with your life, no one else's." The little girl nods, and Lee squeezes her hand.

"Thanks for the assist there," Tenten says on the way home. "I wasn't prepared for that guy to actually shoot at me."

"It is no problem at all!" Lee cries, loud enough that several birds scatter from a tree, and Tenten snorts.

Lee is always happy to protect his female teammate.


End file.
